https://archive.md/ZvjZH
"Amy Lindberg spent 26 years in the Navy and she still walked like it—with
intention, like her chin had someplace to be. But around 2017, her right foot
stopped following orders. Lindberg and her husband Brad were five years into
their retirement. After moving 10 times for Uncle Sam, they’d bought their
dream house near the North Carolina coast. They had a backyard that spilled out
onto wetlands. From the kitchen, you could see cranes hunting. They kept bees
and played pickleball and watched their children grow.
But now Lindberg’s right foot was out of rhythm. She worked hard to ignore it,
but she couldn’t disregard the tremors. And she’d started to misplace words and
thoughts, especially when she got excited. Was this normal? She was 57, fit and
clean-living. Could the culprit be menopause?
The diagnosis took all of five minutes. Lindberg had Parkinson’s disease, the
neurologist said, with all the classic symptoms. PD—as the scientists she would
meet call it—is a neurological disorder, and a life sentence. Sufferers
gradually lose control of their muscles, their bowels, their esophagus. Doctors
told Lindberg that there was no way to know what had caused it.
The daughter of a sailor, Lindberg had built her life around the military. She
was commissioned in the Navy out of college and became an officer at 23. Her
first posting was to Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, a
city-sized training hub that supports more than 60,000 sailors and marines.
There were murmurs even then—whispers of weird cancers and stillbirths—but
Lejeune was one of the prettier pieces of land in the Navy’s property
portfolio. The bachelor officers’ quarters were on a grassy thumb of shoreline
called Paradise Point, where the New River meets the Atlantic.
“Lejeune was just picturesque,” Lindberg says. “We had a river right there, and
the beach wasn’t far away, and you worked half a mile from where you lived.”
She loved her job at the hospital and made lifelong friends. She met her
husband—a photo on her desk shows a blond Lindberg beaming beneath her Navy cap
while Brad smiles broadly in his dress blues. “It was really nice,” she says.
“You’d never suspect the water.”"
Original at
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https://www.wired.com/story/scientists-thought-parkinsons-was-in-our-genes-it-might-be-in-the-water/>
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
